Immaculate Conception

Anne appears as the mother of Mary in the late 2nd-century Gospel of James.[15] Anne and her husband, Joachim, are infertile, but God hears their prayers and Mary is conceived.[16] The conception occurs without sexual intercourse between Anne and Joachim, which fits well with the Gospel of James' persistent emphasis on Mary's sacred purity, but the story does not advance the idea of an immaculate conception.[17] The Eastern Orthodox Church holds that "Mary is conceived by her parents as we are all conceived."[18]

Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Cyril of Jerusalem developed the idea of Mary as the New Eve, drawing comparison to "Eve, while yet immaculate and incorrupt — that is to say, not subject to original sin."[19] So too, Ephrem the Syrian said she was as innocent as Eve before the Fall.[19]

Ambrose says she is incorrupt, a virgin immune through grace from every stain of sin. It was John Damascene's opinion that the supernatural influence of God at the generation of Mary was so comprehensive that it extended also to her parents. He says of them that, during the generation, they were filled and purified by the Holy Spirit, and freed from sexual concupiscence. Consequently according to Damascene, even the human element of her origin, the material of which she was formed, was pure and holy. This opinion of an immaculate active generation and the sanctity of the "conceptio carnis" was taken up by some Western authors. The Greek Fathers never formally or explicitly discussed the question of the Immaculate Conception.[19]

Altar of the Immaculata by Joseph Lusenberg, 1876. Saint Antony's Church, Urtijëi, Italy.

By the 4th century it was generally accepted that Mary was free of personal sin,[20] but original sin raised the question of whether she was also free of the sin passed down from Adam.[21] The question became acute when the feast of her conception began to be celebrated in England in the 11th century,[22] and the opponents of the feast of Mary's conception brought forth the objection that as sexual intercourse is sinful, to celebrate Mary's conception was to celebrate a sinful event.[23] (The feast of Mary's conception originated in the Eastern Church in the 7th century, reached England in the 11th, and from there spread to Europe, where it was given official approval in 1477 and extended to the whole church in 1693; the word "immaculate" was not officially added to the name of the feast until 1854).[22]

The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception caused a virtual civil war between Franciscans and Dominicans during the middle ages, with Franciscan 'Scotists' in its favour and Dominican 'Thomists' against it.[24] [25] The English ecclesiastic and scholar Eadmer (c.1060-c.1126) reasoned that it was possible that Mary was conceived without original sin in view of God's omnipotence, and that it was also appropriate in view of her role as Mother of God: Potuit, decuit, fecit, "it was possible, it was fitting, therefore it was done."[26] Others, including Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), objected that if Mary were free of original sin at her conception then she would have no need of redemption, making Christ superfluous; they were answered by Duns Scotus (1264–1308), who "developed the idea of preservative redemption as being a more perfect one: to have been preserved free from original sin was a greater grace than to be set free from sin."[27] In 1439, the Council of Basel, in schism with Pope Eugene IV who resided at the Council of Florence,[28] declared Mary's Immaculate Conception a "pious opinion" consistent with faith and Scripture; the Council of Trent, held in several sessions in the early 1500s, made no explicit declaration on the subject but exempted her from the universality of original sin; and by 1571 the Pope's Breviary (prayerbook) set out an elaborate celebration of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on 8 December.[29]

The eventual creation of the dogma was due more to popular devotion than scholarship.[30] The Immaculate Conception became a popular subject in literature and art,[3] and some devotees went so far as to hold that Anne had conceived Mary by kissing her husband Joachim, and that Anne's father and grandmother had likewise been conceived without sexual intercourse, although Bridget of Sweden (c.1303–1373) told how Mary herself had revealed to her that Anne and Joachim conceived their daughter through a sexual union which was sinless because it was pure and free of sexual lust.[31]

In the 16th and especially the 17th centuries there was a proliferation of Immaculatist devotion in Spain, leading the Habsburg monarchs to demand that the papacy elevate the belief to the status of dogma.[32] In France in 1830 Catherine Labouré (May 2, 1806 – December 31, 1876) saw a vision of Mary as the Immaculate Conception standing on a globe while a voice commanded her to have a medal made in imitation of what she saw,[33] and her vision marked the beginning of a great 19th-century Marian revival.[34]

In 1849 Pope Pius IX issued the encyclical Ubi primum soliciting the bishops of the church for their views on whether the doctrine should be defined as dogma; ninety percent of those who responded were supportive, while the rest against, one of them was the Archbishop of Paris, Marie-Dominique-Auguste Sibour, who warned that the Immaculate Conception "could be proved neither from the Scriptures nor from tradition", [35] and in 1854 the Immaculate Conception dogma was proclaimed with the bull Ineffabilis Deus.[36]

Dom Prosper Guéranger, Abbot of Solesmes Abbey, who had been one of the main promoters of the dogmatic statement, wrote Mémoire sur l'Immaculée Conception, explaining what he saw as its basis:

For the belief to be defined as a dogma of faith [...] it is necessary that the Immaculate Conception form part of Revelation, expressed in Scripture or Tradition, or be implied in beliefs previously defined. Needed, afterward, is that it be proposed to the faith of the faithful through the teaching of the ordinary magisterium. Finally, it is necessary that it be attested by the liturgy, and the Fathers and Doctors of the Church.[37]

Guéranger maintained that these conditions were met and that the definition was therefore possible. Ineffabilis Deus found the Immaculate Conception in the Ark of Salvation (Noah's Ark), Jacob's Ladder, the Burning Bush at Sinai, the Enclosed Garden from the Song of Songs, and many more passages.[38] From this wealth of support the pope's advisors singled out Genesis 3:15: "The most glorious Virgin ... was foretold by God when he said to the serpent: 'I will put enmity between you and the woman,'"[39] a prophecy which reached fulfilment in the figure of the Woman in the Revelation of John, crowned with stars and trampling the Dragon underfoot.[40] Luke 1:28, and specifically the phrase "full of grace" by which Gabriel greeted Mary, was another reference to her Immaculate Conception: "she was never subject to the curse and was, together with her Son, the only partaker of perpetual benediction."[41]

Ineffabilis Deus was one of the pivotal events of the papacy of Pius, pope from 16 June 1846 to his death on 7 February 1878.[42] Four years after the proclamation of the dogma, in 1858, Mary appeared to the young Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes in southern France, to announce that she was the Immaculate Conception.[43]

Eastern Orthodoxy never accepted Augustine's specific ideas on original sin, and in consequence did not become involved in the later developments that took place in the Roman Catholic Church, including the Immaculate Conception.[66][67] In 1894, when Pope Leo XIII addressed the Eastern church in his encyclical Praeclara gratulationis, Ecumenical Patriarch Anthimos, in 1895, replied with an encyclical approved by the Constantinopolitan Synod in which he stigmatised the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and papal infallibility as "Roman novelties" and called on the Roman church to return to the faith of the early centuries.[10] Eastern Orthodox Bishop Kallistos Ware comments that "the Latin dogma seems to us not so much erroneous as superfluous."[68]

The Eritrean and Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo do believe in the Immaculate Conception of the Theotokos. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church celebrates the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on Nehasie 7 (August 13).[9][69]

In the mid-19th century, some Catholics who were unable to accept the doctrine of papal infallibility left the Roman Church and formed the Old Catholic Church. This movement rejects the Immaculate Conception.[70][71]

Protestants overwhelmingly condemned the promulgation of Ineffabilis Deus as an exercise in papal power, and the doctrine itself as un-scriptural,[6] for it denied that all had sinned and rested on the Latin translation of Luke 1:28 (the "full of grace" passage) that the original Greek did not support.[72] Protestants, therefore, teach that Mary was a sinner saved through grace, like all believers.[41]

The ecumenical Lutheran-Catholic Statement on Saints, Mary, issued in 1990, after seven years of study and discussion, conceded that Lutherans and Catholics remained separated "by differing views on matters such as the invocation of saints, the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of Mary";[73] the final report of the Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC), created in 1969 to further ecumenical progress between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion, similarly recorded the disagreement of the Anglicans with the doctrine, although Anglo-Catholics may hold the Immaculate Conception as an optional pious belief.[74]